I've always been attracted to the idea of science and medicine becoming more "open source", in the sense that all knowledge could be free flowing and lowering the entry to understanding and contributing to it. It could be a great way for the "alt-science" and official academia to benefit each other.

However, I am pretty skeptical on Robertson's approach to this, on several parts, but the most conspicuous is how his "alt-science" seems to be aligning a lot with modern GOP philosophies.

For example, while he explains plainly, "that human activity has not harmfully warmed the Earth", the article he participates in comes to a bit different conclusion, which is "Meaningful integrated assessments of the environmental impacts of anthropogenic CO 2are not yet possible because model estimates of global and regional climate changes on interannual, decadal and centennial time scales remain highly uncertain", which seems a bit dishonest to say the least.

Great article and fascinating read. Academia surely needs to be challenged, but I am afraid I would take more of Pauling's approach myself.